Catching a rocket

[stevebrooks]

Ok, now I am officially impressed!

[Wrenn]

Probably obvious but just in case, thats a CGI render of what they are intending to do in the future with Starship. Their first launches will dump both vehicles in the ocean, assuming they dont blow up again. Once they demonstrate succesful launch/ocean landings they might get to do the catch.

[stevebrooks]

Well SpaceX got Starship to orbit on the second try, the super heavy booster didn't make it through turnover and splashdown, disassembling itself shortly after turnover, but this is the first hot separation they have done so that's probably not surprising.

[stevebrooks]

Update on that, it's up there, but they don't know where exactly, lol. After losing contact it's quite likely the Starship self destructed due to....well...loneliness? No seriously, it may have self destructed, but nobody knows, it was programmed to do that if it left the pre-determined course, so it's likely gone, nonetheless they did get it up there, so each launch is seeing better results as they iron out the problems.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/s ... rcna125827

[Wrenn]

The recent Starship test launch was a huge success so they are expecting to attempt the tower catch of the booster next launch which should be next month. Things are heating up!

[Loki]

If Apollo went at the speed of SpaceX America would be landing on the moon any day now.

4 flights to get far enough to figure out your rocket melts on reentry.

Just as well that Elon has all that sweet public funding ay.

[Wrenn]

If Apollo went at the speed of SpaceX America would be landing on the moon any day now.

I'm not sure speed is a good, or even accurate, argument against Starship.

The Apollo rocket was developed over ~8 years. They had the support of the country and government, spent todays equivalent of $288 billion and employed over 400,000 people.

Starship started in 2018ish, is expected to spend ~5-10 billion in development and SpaceX has less than 12,000 employess, most of whom arent working on Starship. If sucessful the result will be a fully reusable rocket with lower launch costs and higher payload to orbit than the Saturn V.

[stevebrooks]

If Apollo went at the speed of SpaceX America would be landing on the moon any day now.

If Apollo et al went as fast as SpaceX we would have cities on the moon by now. You can't measure progress by a single government funded effort, Apollo was designed for one purpose, to beat Russia to the moon, that's all, there was no other point to it, send a few missions to the moon, bring back samples, after that it just stopped, in fact all progress stopped, they have until recently been using the same apollo era engines.

The current moon project is designed and planned for an entirely different purpose and it is far more difficult and greater in scope than Apollo could ever hope to be. There were a lot of people expecting that the Apollo project would continue on in spirit with space habitats and a return to the moon decades ago, the L5 Society was founded in 1975 with that premise in mind, but alas it never happened.

[Loki]

Noone had capable rocketry in the apollo era.

Everything was new.

The first full Apollo test tested the equipment required for every single part of the mission. Successfully.

On a planet where any number of countries and companies now routinely put cargo into space SpaceX has taken 4 flights to barely get a barely controlled empty vessel there with zero fuel reserves and has discovered that their ship can't safely de-orbit.

Seeing as they are already late on their contract and their single commercial flight has been cancelled because the client got bored and their greatest success so far has been getting to orbit without blowing up I'll hold off just a little longer on the Musk ego stroking.

[stevebrooks]

The first full Apollo test tested the equipment required for every single part of the mission. Successfully.

Simply because they were planning to just throw everything away, that's a much simpler challenge than building something that can take off and land itself and then be reused, the starship would by Apollo standards been a hugely successful test, completely successful, so I don't understand your point. Getting something successfully into orbit is relatively easy, countries all over the world have been doing that for many years. The Russians were doing itt in 1957, the Apollo project did nothing that hadn't been done previously and the principals were well understood. Getting something up there and landing it back on earth for re-use, that's something that no-one has ever done before. The Saturn 5 was basically just a bigger rocket and nothing more.